Archive for the ‘Doggie biscuits’ Category

The web page finally got a make-over after two years of patiently waiting on our to do list and several months of work and careful planning to roll it out simultaneously across the main web site, the store, the blog and the forum. All of which run different software so we had to coordinate several different templates.

It took us this long because the main priority has always been our apps and Doghouse. Nora and I have seen our time consumed by the Pedias and Pocketpedia, so we let Alex, our Doghouse guru (the man responsible for the results you get when searching), tackle the job. He gave the web site time on weekends and when he needed a break of thinking about all the moving pieces that is Doghouse administration. Since finishing the migration to new servers and a Padrino API he has found himself with more time, so work quickly accelerated.

All of a sudden I load the web site one morning and everything is in place. It’s nice to see all these months of work spring up all of a sudden and even more exciting to be able to share this with all our users. Since it was a complete overhaul there will be a couple of months of tweaks and users have already started pointing Alex in the right direction. Like all software and trees the web page is changing and growing and there are always corners that need trimming; so do pester Alex if you find any broken links or missing functionality.

On the technical side, Nora and I are old school and tend to write each HTML tag in a text editor and then style it with some basic CSS. Alex on the other hand is new age and uses all the latest frameworks. Those of you who have signed up as moderators to Doghouse know all the animations and fancy designs he employs via Ruby on Rails and things called LESS and SCSS (he assures me that LESS is more). Nora and I were not quite ready to give up our regular HTML so we asked him to still use some traditional HTML with a light sprinkling of new frameworks for type and layout. Especially since we knew that the integrations with PHPBB (the forum) and WordPress (the blog) otherwise would be complicated. Not to mention eSellerate’s system (the store) that still uses ASP.

We are quite impressed with the work Alex has done on the web site and want to thank him for all the hard work and extra hours he has put in to this. Glad to have a man of so many trades on the team, who was able to finally get this web site removed from the to do list. Hopefully the trend for flat will stay steady for a couple of years and we won’t need a redesign for a while.

John Gruber linked to a Universal Studio commercial that is a copy of Apple’s Christmas commercial with a few changes: the protagonist is a girl instead of a boy, the location is Universal Studios and not a family home, the creation is a photo album and not a movie and they are using Samsung phones and not iPhones. Nothing exceptional nor unexpected. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the entire commercial was financed by Samsung.

However noteworthy was a comment with a new word that I was amazed is not in popular use. User ebernet simply said, “Samesunged!”. How is this word not part of the daily lexicon? It should have followed xeroxed and googled and be a common verb by now. Googling proves it to have been used only three times, the oldest attribution being user forcenine on Mac Rumors, who has only 16 posts but this could be his contribution to our shared dictionary.

I don’t think it needs to apply to the actual Samsung brand pruducts or Apple, anything can be samesunged:Transmit's icon is often samesunged.

A childhood friend has released his first iOS app and has named it in honor of the Pedias. Recipedia comes to fill all your kitchen organizing needs. We attended my friend’s wedding last year and we expected a different kind of announcement a year later but that just goes to show the rise of iOS is so meteoric that the first creation of a married couple is now an app. Jose did all the programming and his wife the design.

For a 1.0 it’s a solid release, stable with all the main areas that you might need in a recipe organizer. The option to edit online recipes once they’re saved is very useful since I often tinker with recipes to fit my tastes. The flow of some areas needs updating such as the “save recipe” button which asks you to chose a category to store the recipe in but it’s not immediately clear where this option is located. Ideally the alert would include the different categories as button choices, saving one click. Power users will then automatically figure out that they can set the category beforehand, while the rest of us can continue to use the buttons.

It’d also be nice to get a picture of your own recipes in the internal search results, especially given the height available for each search result. I would like to the see the “add new recipe” and “copy/paste recipe” integrated into a single command and merge the smarts of copy/paste (automatic separation of ingredients and steps) directly into the individual fields (with an option to undo, should I want to keep all paragraphs in one step). But here I am probably overlooking some complicated technical details that would not make this possible. As a personal favorite I’d love to see Serious Eats as an online source and the ability to change the order of ingredients and instructions.

At $2.99 Recipedia is a steal and if you’re into cooking you should check out this adopted brother of the Pedias. Getting started in the App Store is very exciting and we wish them the best of luck. Being able to live of your software creation and then have the financial/fan support to continue to develop it is a great career.

Posted in Doggie biscuits | Comments Off on Totally Unrelated Recipedia (Actually a Bit of a Relation)

DVDpedia user Chas has written an info view template, with the help of Forum user Jonas, that includes some nifty links to Wikipedia and IMDb.

Just click on the little icons next to a name and the relevant page will open. Of course the possibilities here are endless – icons like these could be used for links to Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu… (Reminds me of the LeoTab info view template which incorporates a trailer and cover image search.)

You can download the template from our Extras page. I hope you enjoy it; thanks Chas!

What better way to celebrate the start of 2011 than with some excellent shots of DVDpedia in action, courtesy of DVDpedia user SP. He currently has 4365 movies in the program (total duration 631.92 days) and quite a sweet setup in his living room:

Can any one compete with this, setup and/or library-size wise? Let’s hear it!

The Child’s Play charity was set up a few years ago by the funny folks from Penny Arcade. They collect toys, video games, movies, books and money for children’s hospitals in North America (and expanding around the world). Being in hospital is awful enough but it’s even worse during the holidays so hopefully these donations make the time a bit more enjoyable and bring some cheer to the kids.

Bruji is proud to be a corporate sponsor for Child’s Play 2010 once again. If you’d also like to become a sponsor, donate to the hospital toy drive or just send $5 via text message, check out Child’s Play Charity for details.

The fine developers at Para9, creators of the DVDpedia Front Row and Apple TV plug-in, have released their latest iPhone app – muBlip. Like all developers they’ve been excited about developing for the iPhone and after a few commission jobs they now found the time to develop an enthralling game on their own count. muBlip is a rhythm game where you tap along to the music, Guitar Hero-style. Although this has been done before, the design of muBlip is well thought out.

The game play is smooth and intuitive. Just click on the shape in time with the music. Sometimes it seems to miss a few taps and drags but to be fair this is more likely my bad rhythm. In the beginner levels muBlip uses chill tracks to teach the player to relax and follow the music. It was not until the medium levels that I ran into trouble. Here the game gets more visually oriented and the controls jump around, a bit like “Simon Says” on steroids. I enjoyed the higher levels more, where the layout stays the same and new notes are added. Levels like “Drummer Boy” are great fun as it gives you time to familiarize yourself with the current blip layout as well as the song rhythm.

I am not thrilled about the title’s first letter lowercase and subsequent camel–case. But in this day and age where all plural game names end with Z (I’m looking at you “Tigerz” and “Horsez”), creative grammar is a marketing must; after all we are already playing it on a device that starts with the one letter your English teacher fought to have always capitalized.

The game comes with few levels (11), including the tutorials, but for $1.99 it’s a fair offering. The game also scores you on accuracy, giving the levels a big replay value as you try to improve your score. This being the first release, I am looking forward to more levels as well as variety in music styles. I would love to have some blues and jazz rhythms. There is also a hardcore mode but so far I am having too much fun with the causal mode to dare venture into hardcore.